More Facebook apps but less Facebook?

Last week Facebook announced it's opening the stream to developers here.
The stream is the core experience of Facebook, giving users info on the activities of their friends. Every update, picture upload, photo tag, wall-to-wall exchange, status change, etc., is atomized and beamed to your homepage. It's sortable, I think, if you categorize your friends into groups.
Here is Mark Zuckerberg's blog post on the stream and latest redesign, which users invariably seem to hate.

Anyway, with Facebook's Open Stream API, developers can program new widgets and Web sites to allow people to see their Facebook content without logging into Facebook.

The NYTimes gives an imperfect analogy of a corner grocery store giving away all its merchandise to anybody to sell for themselves, in exchange for the extra foot traffic that would propel the store to the social nexus of the neighborhood.

Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop are two applications (using the cloud-computing-esque Adobe Air) that let people control their Facebook and Twitter info without logging into those sites every time. I haven't tried these two products because my five-year-old Powerbook doesn't work with Air. But over a million people use Seesmic alone, and these sites are gaining in popularity.

It will be very interesting if Facebook's "altruism" can make it money. As the Times writes:

And if the developers somehow find a profitable niche, that would pose another concern. These companies might actually end up inadvertently asphyxiating Facebook and Twitter, both currently unprofitable, by drawing users and advertisers away from those sites.

If you give the content away, such that customers come to expect it, doesn't that limit your options to charge later? Facebook is starting to do what the AP and news outlets already do - give access to their content for free. But I don't think the news outlets make money off this, or else media execs wouldn't complain about Google making money off ads on its Google News aggregator.

Maybe Facebook will succeed in this game, either through advertising or by becoming the ultimate one-stop shop for social networking on the Internet. If so, news outlets should take note and copy Facebook's success.